"Maybe you were too tough for the JUSTICE SOCIETY... but, mister, now you've got to fight the SUPER SQUAD!": JSA All-Stars

During Justice Society of America vol. 3 (see item #44 below), a particularly stupid subplot saw the JSA breaking up into two distinct teams: the original JSA relocated to Happy Harbor to keep doing their thing, while a group of offshoots led by Power Girl but instigated by Magog formed the "All-Stars," which were supposed to be proactive and militaristic. The result was an eighteen-issue spin-off series called JSA All-Stars published from 2010 to 2011,* written by Lilah Sturges (then known as Matthew) and mostly illustrated by Freddie Williams II. (Flashpoint and the New 52 would kill it off.)

Like... why? If the twenty-first century JSA has worked at all, it's worked when it's been about the team's long history, its "legacy." The All-Stars undermine this by siphoning the legacy characters away from the original ones; the team mostly consists of younger heroes like Power Girl, Hourman, Cyclone, King Chimera, Wildcat II, Damage, and Stargirl. These characters are mostly interesting when contrasted against the older heroes. On top of that, the whole instigating incident is quickly rendered pointless when in Justice Society of America Annual vol. 3 #2, set between issues #3 and 4 of JSA All-Stars, Magog leaves the team! Thus the new proactive, militaristic JSA groups loses the person who makes them proactive and militaristic. So why did they split exactly? (Power Girl herself actually lampshades this with a conversation in the Power Trip collection.)

Once you move beyond that supposedly-unique-but-pointless team set-up... there's not much to this. There are three big story arcs, plus a couple smaller stories, and all of them left me cold. A lot of "big" action—gods returning, people jumping timelines, journeys into other dimensions—but nothing that ever seems clever or interesting, nothing that elevates the title above fairly generic superhero punch-ups. There are good characters on this team... but who is Stargirl when she's not part of the real JSA? Who is the Rick Tyler Hourman away from his wife? (More on him later.) This overlaps with Amanda Conner's Power Girl, and the character here has basically nothing to do with the character there other than costume. At one point a sorceress joins the team, and no one ever even bothers to explain who she is or where she is from. (I think Victorian England? Would have been nice to know.)

The one good issue is probably the Blackest Night epilogue, where everyone mourns the death of Damage. Unfortunately, it makes you realize more was done with him in one issue after he died than in six issues where he was alive.

Freddie Williams is a competent artist, and I seem to remember enjoying other work by him, but nothing from this title sticks out positively in my memory. There is a funny bit where a villain is using what is clearly the TARDIS console and control room from Doctor Who... and Williams (coincidentally, one assumes) draws the villain looking like Jodie Whittaker!

from JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #9
(script by Jen Van Meter, art by Travis Moore & Dan Green)

The one thing that does kind of work is the Liberty Belle and Hourman back-up, The Inheritance. Set before the team split up, this covers the adventures of the married couple as they travel around the world to track down a powerful artifact, competing against but sometimes working with Icicle and Tigress. It appears in ten-page installments from issues #2 to #11. It's kind of hard to follow at times—one has the feeling no one involved knows how to tell a story in ten-page chunks—but it's fun. I like Jen Van Meter's work on JSA Classified a lot, and it's good to see her writing these two villains again, and she does great by the superpowered power couple as well. Travis Moore acquits himself well on pencils, and it's always great to see the dependable Dan Green on inks. I don't know if these were collected, but it probably would have made a nice 100-page collection (maybe throw in the Liberty Belle/Hourman stories from the Justice Society of America 80-Page Giants), but I suspect no one other than me would buy it, alas.

This post is forty-eighth in an almost concluded series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years. Previous installments are listed below:

You can't go home to Earth-Two again: The Young All-Stars

In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC's All-Star Squadron was wound down and replaced by a new ongoing series, The Young All-Stars. Instead of focusing on established Golden Age characters, this focused on a group of largely original World War II-era characters, picking up from where All-Star Squadron had left off in early 1942. Some of the characters are vague analogues who were removed from the WWII era by the changes of the Crisis.

So there is:

• Arn "Iron" Munro, a strongman (sort of a Superman analogue)
• Flying Fox, a First Nations Canadian (a very loose Batman analogue, only in the sense that they're both spooky-looking flying creatures; his powers are all tribal mysticism stuff)
• Helena "Fury" Kosmatos, deriving her power from the Greek Furies (replacing the Golden Age Wonder Woman as the mother of Lyta "Fury" Trevor of Infinity, Inc.)
• Neptune "Neptune Perkins" Perkins, who has water powers (a preexisting character, but he had only appeared in two Golden Age stories before Roy Thomas picked him up for use in All-Star Squadron; kind of an Aquaman analogue)
• Danny "Dyna-Mite" Dunbar, who has explosion powers (the only one of these characters to actually have an ongoing feature during the Golden Age, he had been sidekick to TNT)
• Miya "Tsunami" Mishada, also with water powers (she appeared as a villain in All-Star Squadron)
• [joining the team later] Paula "Tigress" Brooks, a master of all weapons (eventually it's revealed that she'll go on to be the original Huntress, a villain who appeared opposite Wildcat in Sensation Comics, as well as opposite the Helena Wayne Huntress in the 1970s All Star Comics revival)

The problem is that I just never really cared about any of these characters. I don't think character is Roy Thomas's strong point, but on All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc., he was able to get there in the end; the All-Stars were a colorful lot who popped well, and the Infinitors started weak but became compelling. Is it because the All-Stars were (mostly) preexisting characters and the Infinitors closely tied to preexisting ones? Did Dann Thomas exert less influence on this series than on Infinity, Inc.? (My assumption, perhaps unfounded, is he comes up with the plots that reconcile forty-year old continuity errors, and she writes all the good character stuff and dialogue.)

Or is it the art? The more I read comics, the more I come to suspect things people perceive as "writing" problems are often art ones. If characters don't pop, is it because the writing is poor, or because the artists can't communicate character? I never really warmed to any of the series regular artists, and it went through a number of them. All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. were both blessed by Jerry Ordway, who went on to be a superstar, and other collaborators included standouts like Tony DeZuniga, Vince Colletta, and even, I must admit, Todd McFarlane. Young All-Stars didn't have such great artists, and the ones it did have were rarely constant; the first twelve issues had six different pencillers and six different inkers. The only one of the title's regular artists I'd ever heard of was Malcolm Jones III, who went from issue #19 of Young All-Stars in Dec. 1988 to issue #4 of obscure new title The Sandman in Apr. 1989. But being good is not the same as being a good fit, and you might guess someone well-suited to Neil Gaiman's milieu isn't well suited to Roy Thomas's, no matter how good he is.

The premise of Young All-Stars picks up from that of All-Star Squadron, chronicling a superhero-centric take on World War II. When it's good, it's when it's actually leaning into this; my favorite story line was Atom and Evil! (#21-25), a post-Crisis retelling of Superman vs. Wonder Woman. This did the kind of thing I always enjoyed in All-Star Squadron, take real history and refract it through the lens of the DC universe in a way that was pretty fun. I liked the incorporation of a supergroup made up of representatives of each of the Allies, especially Kuei, the Chinese demon. I would like to see more of him, but it looks like he was never used again after his final appearance in Young All-Stars #27. I also liked the way it played with Superman vs. Wonder Woman; at first it looks like it's going to be a beat-for-beat replay of that story (with, say, Fury in the Wonder Woman role) but then it goes off on its own direction. It did, alas, remove some of Gerry Conway's moral complexity.

But most of the time the series doesn't do this. I'm not sure why (various comments in the lettercol made me think it was a DC editorial directive, but also Roy Thomas seems to act like it's a creative choice at times). I think what really makes the Earth-Two/JSA stuff interesting, as I've said, is the sense of legacy and history, but that's largely lacking here.

There's not as much connection with real history as in All-Star Squadron, and there's not as much DC history, either, as Iron Munro, Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami are all characters who didn't really have any connection to the present-day DC universe. Fury's daughter is one of my favorite Infinity, Inc. and Sandman characters, but I ended up often feeling like her mother was a potentially strong character rendered impotent by the stories told about her, which mostly revolve around 1) her powers being too strong for her and 2) whether she should date Iron Munro. You get little insight into Lyta Trevor by reading about Helena Kosmatos. (We never learn, as far as I know, what must be the thing we most want to learn about Helena: why did she give up baby Lyta and who was the father.)

Instead, the series often focuses on tying the DC universe into pre-superhero fiction. Iron Munro, for example, is revealed to be the son of Hugo Danner, the protagonist of the 1930 novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie (co-author of When Worlds Collide). Gladiator may have influenced Siegel and Shuster's conception of Superman, and so here Hugo Danner becomes the literal father of The Young All-Stars's Superman analogue. Similarly, Neptune Perkins is revealed to be the grandson of Arthur Gordon Pym, from the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, in a storyline that also takes in the vril (from The Coming Race, though Thomas doesn't seem to know this is the origin of the term because he never mentions it), Captain Nemo (establishing he was Pym!), and Frankenstein's creature! When Hugo Danner eventually appears, in the Sons of Dawn storyline, we learn he's taken refuge in the "lost world" of Arthur Conan Doyle fame, and there's even a relative of Professor Challenger involved.

As a concept, I think this is interesting. Superhero fiction is a genre that has pretty freely borrowed from other genres, and engaging with this more directly is a fun idea. Gladiator may have influenced superman, "lost tribe" narratives are a staple of superhero fiction, the X-Men's Savage Land is a pretty obvious riff on Doyle's Lost World, superhero fiction is full of Frankensteinesque mad scientists and Frankenstein's-creatureesque monsters. Why not make all this text instead of subtext?

Well, because if you're Roy Thomas, you're unable to do so in a way that's interesting. Young All-Stars doesn't really tell stories that use these connections; rather, it relates backstory that reveals them. The Arn Munro/Hugo Danner thing has an issue where basically Arn just reads Gladiator. The Dzyan Inheritance is the four-issue story where we learn about Neptune Perkins's ancestry-- and fully the first two and half issues are just people giving exposition! Does knowing his grandfather was Captain Nemo develop his character? It turns out, no; in fact, he barely contributes to the story. Sons of Dawn is the closest any of these tales come to have a present-day repercussion, but then the story is a bit of racist nonsense about how if American natives see an attractive white woman, they immediately begin with the pillaging to get ahold of her. Plus: will Arn be tempted to join his father as a genocidal dictator? Well, no, of course not.

The shame of it all is that there are some potentially interesting threads. Helena wants to be using her powers to liberate Greece, but can't because of the spell cast by Hitler. Tsunami changed sides-- but is now fighting for a nation that puts her parents in camps. Flying Fox is a "fish out of water" in the modern world. All of these bits have potential, but the series basically neglects them in favor of much less interesting stuff. Flying Fox may as well have not been in this series for all he ultimately contributed to it beyond being a body in fight scenes.

There were a couple neat storylines aside from Atom and Evil! I liked the journey into Project M, America's attempt to create monsters to use in the war; the "Meanwhile..." issue that showed what the rest of the All-Star Squadron was up to was a fun one; the Millennium tie-in issues were fun, and a good use of the Manhunters. But too often I sighed as I opened another issue.

I'll be curious to see if future JSA writers make use of Young All-Stars concepts going forward. Something I had totally forgotten (I guess because it didn't mean much to me at the time) is that Arn Munro is actually the grandfather of the Kate Spencer Manhunter; he would sleep with the Phantom Lady, and she gave the child up for adoption, who grew up to be Kate's dad. Arn even appeared in the Forgotten and Face Off storylines, but rereading my reviews of them, I liked the Golden Age aspect of them the least! I know Helena put in some more appearances that I will get to. But did Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami amount to anything? I have this inkling the answer might be "no" but comics writers always surprise me by bringing back the most obscure of concepts. Clearly Marc Andreyko was a big Young All-Stars (and Infinity, Inc.) reader, so who else was?

This post is sixteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Gladiator. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
    

Review: All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant

In 1999, All-Star Comics had two momentary revivals. All Star Comics vol. 2 was part of the Justice Society Returns! storyline, so I'll cover it when I get to that, but there was also the All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant. Like most of the 1990s/2000s 80-page giants, it contains several original short tales on a central topic. I meant to read it with All-Star Squadron, as the latest All-Star ongoing, but ended up not getting it until later and thus read it after Infinity, Inc. I wish I had read it with All-Star Squadron, though, because despite not being published until over a decade later, it really feels like it ties in with Roy Thomas's work on that series.

Partially the reason for that is obvious. One of the stories in here is explicitly an All-Star Squadron tale, and Roy Thomas writes it. I haven't got to Young All-Stars yet, but I understand it takes the All-Star Squadron story from April 1942 up to June; "Thunderstruck" reads like it could thus be the very next issue after Young All-Stars #31, picking up on June 27, 1942 with the adventures of Green Lantern, Doctor Fate, Firebrand, and the Shining Knight; there's even appearance by those perennial All-Star Squadron favorites, FDR and Churchill. It's a fun story that reignites the oft-deferred romance between Firebrand and the Shining Knight. (I know many threads from Thomas's 1940s series were picked up in the present day in later JSA revivals, so I hope I will see what become of these two.)

script by Roy Thomas, art by Kevin Sharpe & J. Baumgartner

But outside of that explicit All-Star Squadron branding, several of the other, stories feel more like tributes to the Thomas version of the JSA rather than the Golden Age itself. "The Way of the Amazon" by Eric Luke, Chris Jones, and Keith Champagne is billed as a Wonder Woman tale. While Crisis on Infinite Earths wrote the Earth-Two Wonder Woman out of history, and Roy Thomas's work on Infinity, Inc., Young All-Stars, and Secret Origins substituted Miss America and Fury into her place in history, John Byrne's run on Wonder Woman in the late 1990s later featured Diana's mother, Queen Hippolyta, traveling back in time to the 1940s and acting as Wonder Woman during World War II, giving a different/new explanation of who took the Earth-Two Wonder Woman's role in so many Golden Age stories. Set in June 1943, "The Way of the Amazon" folds that retcon in with Thomas's All-Star Squadron milieu, featuring Hippolyta hanging out with the Phantom Lady and Liberty Belle in the Perisphere. It's another fun story, as the trio of women take down a Nazi air fortress and discover the original Red Tornado.

script by Eric Luke, art by Chris Jones & Keith Champagne

The other stories here don't draw as heavily on Roy Thomas retcons, but many still feel like they could have slotted in as issues of All-Star Squadron had the series made it further than April 1942. The Sandman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman team up in "Waking Nightmare" (November 1942); the Atom has to be steered into pacifism by the rest of the JSA in "Steam Engine" (December 1942); Starman has to talk the Spectre into believing in hope again in "P.O.V.—a Fable" (January 1945). Of these one, my favorite was "Steam Engine," a charming tale of how the Atom lets the way bigger people mock him get him down-- no surprise that it comes from the pen of Mark Waid. The story of "Waking Nightmare" was hard to understand, to be honest, but the evocative art of Dennis Cowan and John Floyd makes up for it. (They draw the wrong Sandman costume, as continuity pedants love to note, but the gasmask one is way better than the yellow-and-purple one, so who cares?) On the other hand, I found "P.O.V." pretty unconvincing; why was it Starman who needed to help the Spectre regain his connection to humanity? Why would seeing someone in an internment camp make a paper airplane even help? (If the Spectre really feels so bad, why wouldn't he just close the camp himself?)

script by John Ostrander, art by Dennis Cowan & John Floyd

Just two stories seem to go outside of the All-Star Squadron-verse. "The 90-Minute Man" by Tom Peyer, Peter Pachoumis, and Wade Von Grawbadger is a pre-war, straight Hourman tale, where the guy who has superpowers last only sixty minutes has to figure out how to take down someone with one-and-a-half times the duration! I've read a lot of stories with Hourman in them, but this is probably the first where I've actually got something out of his gimmick. There's just one of these not set during the Golden Age, "The Ropes" by David Goyer & James Robinson, David Ross, and Andrew Hennessy, where the Jack Knight Starman spars with Wildcat and talks courage. It's okay. (It's the only one of these stories to be collected, in The Starman Omnibus, Volume Five. I feel like it probably reads better in that context than this one.)

script by Joe Kelly, art by Duncan Rouleau & Aaron Sowd

Overall, it seems like 1999 was the time of JSA revivals. It was the year after Hippolyta was retconned into the JSA, and the year that we got The Justice Society Returns!, the debut of the Geoff Johns Stargirl, and the return of a JSA ongoing comic. It will be some time before I get to all that, but All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant is a good tribute to the ongoing vitality of DC's original superheroes. If anyone ever bothers to make an All-Star Squadron/Young All-Stars collection (unlikely), they could do a lot worse than chucking a few of these in at the end.

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant was originally published in one issue (Sept. 1999). The stories were written by Mark Waid, Joe Kelly, Eric Luke, Tom Peyer, Roy Thomas, John Ostrander, and David Goyer & James Robinson; pencilled by Adam DeKraker, Duncan Rouleau, Chris Jones, Peter Pachoumis, Kevin Sharpe, Dennis Cowan, and David Ross; inked by Mark Propst, Aaron Sowd, Keith Champagne, Wade Von Grawbadger, J. Baumgartner, John Floyd, and Andrew Hennessy; lettered by Ken Lopez, Ken Bruzenak, Kurt Hathaway, Rick Parker, and John Costanza; colored by Gloria Vasquez, John Kalisz, Noelle Giddings, and Carla Feeny; and edited by Dan Raspler with Tony Bedard.

This post is the twelfth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Steel, the Indestructible Man. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
    

"A world at war! And against the forces of Axis darkness, the mightiest heroes of Earth-Two have banded together, under direct orders of the President, as the... ALL-STAR SQUADRON"

All-Star Squadron is an important moment in the history of superhero comic books. In the letter column of issue #10 (Feb. 1983) is the first recorded occurrence of "retroactive continuity," the word later shortened to "retcon." Writer Roy Thomas uses it in response to a letter from Lee Allred (who would himself become a comic book writer of, among other things, Fantastic Four and Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes). Allred praises Thomas for his "matching of Golden-Age comics history with new plotlines." Thomas's reply makes it clear the word is not his coinage: "As for what Roy himself (myself) is trying to do, we like to think an enthusiastic ALL-STAR booster at one of Adam Malin's Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best name for it, a few months back: 'Retroactive Continuity.' Has kind of ring, don't you think?"

Retcons would go on to be one of the major creative forces of the superhero comics industry, and it all begins here! Well, kind of. That statement's untrue in two ways. One is that comics writers had long been willing to "retcon" things when needed. The other is that this actually isn't how we now think about retcons. Often these days, "retcon" is used to mean an idea that retroactively wipes out old continuity: think of all the different origins of Green Arrow. Sometimes the new origin is justified in-story (e.g., a timeline change), but sometimes a new writer just tells an old story a new way. But Roy Thomas means the opposite. This isn't new continuity that retroactively disregards old, but new new continuity that retroactively slots in.

All-Star Squadron takes as its premise that all the Golden Age comics adventures happened as written. (Basically, anyway.) But in between those adventures, these ones happened. The series begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor; after the Japanese attack, President Roosevelt organizes every American superhero into the All-Star Squadron, who will fight the Axis on the home front. This gives Thomas access to every character published by DC in the 1940s, plus those published by Quality Comics (whose characters were published by DC after the company ceased operations in 1956). The resulting organization has an extraordinary amount of members (over fifty), though in practice the comic tended to focus on a smaller set of the larger membership. Thomas weaves the adventures of the A-SS (um...) in and out of real Golden Age stories, as well as real World War II history.

It's pretty enjoyable stuff. There are two sets of characters Thomas tends to prioritize: the core Justice Society members (e.g., the Atom, Doctor Fate, the Spectre, and so on) and a set of characters whose adventures are much less chronicled (usually Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, Robotman, Commander Steel, Firebrand, the Shining Knight, Amazing-Man, Tarantula). I tended to enjoy the book more when it focused on this latter set. I don't think the JSA qua the JSA is notably interesting: too many of them are square-jawed heroes who come from money, and of course their storylines are fairly set in stone.

But the other characters-- whose own series were short-lived, and whose futures were wide open-- give Thomas a canvas to do more. I really liked both female leads. Liberty Belle is the leader of the All-Stars, a real Golden Age character given new life here. I liked her a lot: a fierce, opinionated woman who swam the English Channel to escape the Nazis and who now argues in favor of American military intervention in the war through her radio show, she's a strong leader character in the Saturn girl mode. Plus she has a cool costume, complete with jodhpurs. (It took me some research to figure out why her pants had this weird thing on them.) Firebrand is a Roy Thomas creation, a distaff version of an existing Quality Comics character. Wealthy society girl Dannette Reilly replaces her brother when he's incapacitated during Pearl Harbor and she spontaneously gains fire powers. Again, a fun character. Many of the others are good, too: Robotman is a tragic character with a perpetual smile, Commander Steel too has a tragic background. (Steel was a retcon character from a brief 1970s WWII-set ongoing. More on him when I eventually jump back to his series.) I liked Amazing-Man, a black Olympic medalist spurned by his own country. These characters could change, go places, enter relationships, and so on.

This is the kind of comics I like. A team made of diverse personalities, working together. I did feel sometimes as though I liked the idea of the characters more than the actualities, as Thomas will never be praised for amazing dialogue or character-focused plots. But it's the kind of comic series that's greater than the sum of its parts: I have fond memories of its sprawling cast, even if I couldn't point at a specific story and say, "That one made good use of them."

The stories weave in and out of existing Golden Age stories, as I said. Thomas usually fills you in or recaps, which is fine. He was at times more interested in the retroactive continuity than the other elements of storytelling. In Annual #3 (1984), for example, we learn that Green Lantern stepped down as chairman of the JSA because he accidentally killed someone. This isn't a character point-- it's never mentioned before or since, it never affects any decision he makes-- it's just there to explain why he was abruptly replaced as chair between issues in the original All Star Comics run of the JSA. Or Hourman struggles with an addiction, but Thomas doesn't get any character mileage out of it; it just explains why he switched from using a pill for his powers to a ray. There's also a lot of time spent explaining how some characters are on Earth-Two in these stories even though they were on Earth-X in a JLA/JSA crossover from the 1970s. At first it's interesting, but it goes on and on and it's honestly contrived even for this medium.

What was more interesting was the way Thomas grounded the series in the war. I know the comics actually do a lot with the war, but in my experience, it's in a pretty jingoistic, simplistic way. Thomas weaves All-Star Squadron in and out of the actual events of World War II. The All-Stars deal with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, attack Japan (unsuccessfully) in revenge, save Churchill from assassination during a real America visit, discover the Ultra-Humanite was responsible for a real act of sabotage, fight in the real Battle of Santa Barbara, and so on. The Justice Society members enlist as ordinary soldiers and officers, but soon end up activated as the Justice Battalion under the command of the War Department, Roy Thomas expanding a real Golden-Age story into a multi-issue saga.

Probably my favorite of all of these was when Thomas had the All-Stars involved in a real 1942 Detroit race riot in issues #38-40 (Oct.-Dec. 1984). (Black defense workers brought in to increase production were met with hostility by white residents.) He's not afraid to criticize his own leads; at first, many of the All-Stars (who are all white except for Amazing-Man) are all, "Well, really, both sides are violent and thus should be criticized" before finally realizing that maybe it's worse to be a violent racist than someone using violence to defend themselves from violent racists.

One aspect of the series is somewhat ridiculous: it ran sixty-seven regular issues; the first sixty make it from December 1941 (Pearl Harbor) to April 1942. That's twelve issues per month of story time on average, though February disproportionately has twenty-three issues (plus two annuals) devoted to it. It took two years of actual release time to get through February, almost an issue for each day of the month! To make it to V-J Day, All-Star Squadron would have needed to run about 528 issues. To be able to do that, it would still need to be running now, as with issue #1 debuting Sept. 1981, #528 wouldn't be reached until Oct. 2024 if I've done my sums right.

I feel like this was somewhat optimistic.

I would really like to know why Roy Thomas took this approach. Why stretch it out so much? He did go on to cover May and June 1942 in the sequel series The Young All-Stars (which I haven't yet read), but that still leaves over three years of wartime uncovered! So we have seven months packed with superhero incident, and many more comparatively empty. He had to know even at best, All-Star Squadron would make it to 100 issues tops. It sometimes feels contrived within the story, even; there's a story set in 1942 that explains a powers and costume change the Atom underwent in 1948. Why are we explaining this now and not in 1948? Or, there's a bit where we're told Robotman built a special aircraft to transport the All-Stars in his spare time. What spare time!?

The art is always solid; Thomas was assigned and/or picked good collaborators, the best of which was Jerry Ordway. Ordway's done great stuff since as both writer and artist, but this was his first ongoing comics assignment; he inked most of issues #1-20, and pencilled most of #19-29 (before departing to co-create Infinity, Inc., again with Thomas).

There are some specific stories worth commenting on in brief:

• #9-10: "Afternoon of the Assassins!" / "Should Old Acquaintance Be Destroyed…" (May-June 1982) wraps a frame story around an unpublished issue of Gerry Conway's Steel, the Indestructible Man series from the 1970s. Conway's dialogue is left mostly intact; Jerry Ordway inks over Don Heck's 1970s pencils. It's a clever idea, though in practice, I found the Steel flashbacks kind of dull. I wonder if I will enjoy them more when I read the preceding issues.
• #13: "One Day during the War…" (Sept. 1982) is a slice-of-life story following a number of All-Stars on a single day. It's neat, and quiet, and the kind of thing I wish Thomas had done more often. (Though Dannette gets over her anti-Japanese racism improbably easily.)
• #18-26 and Annual #1 (Feb.-Oct. 1983) form a gigantic epic about the All-Stars battling the Ultra-Humanite and his/her minions, as well as another version of the Ultra-Humanite from 1984, and their own descendants in Infinity, Inc.! A big cast, a big story, it slowly build from a single confrontation with Thor(!) to a massive showdown. Great stuff, superhero comics at its best.
• #36-37: "Thunder over London!" / "Lightning in Berlin!" (Aug.-Sept. 1984) bring in Captain Marvel from Earth-S, temporarily under Nazi mind-control. It has its high points (I liked how Superman was mad because he thought Marvel was a knock-off), but it's way too easy for the All-Stars to sneak into Hitler's HQ and back out again. That should have been much more tense!
• #50-56: Special Crisis Cross-overs (Oct. 1985–Apr. 1986) cover how the Crisis affected 1943. This was neat, because I had a little frisson when I realized that #50 was leading into a scene I remembered from reading Crisis on Infinite Earths for the first time... all the way back in 2008! But this time I had a context for who Dannette Reilly was! And the sub-plot about Mr. Mind popping over from Earth-S to do a really bad job of running a supervillain team was some inspired comedy. Some of it was tough reading, though; the issue about defending Cape Canaveral against time-lost Indians seemed to have nothing to do with anything. But there was some fun stuff... even though the Crisis sounded a death-knell for All-Star Squadron, as several All-Stars could not have existed in this new context, and several others would have to be substantively changed. Roy Thomas grumbled in a letter column that at first he was told he could have an exemption for his series: Earth-Two could exist in the past, even if in the present it had been merged with Earths-One, -Four, -S, and -X. But I can see why this wasn't allowed to happen: if the goal of Crisis was to reduce confusion, saying there was an alternate Earth in the 1940s whose history had been erased doesn't seem like it would do it.
• #52, 55-59: Shanghaied into Hyperspace! (Dec. 1985, Mar.-July 1986) is a series of back-up stories showing what the Justice Society was up to during the Crisis. A Nazi plot (supplied by the Monitor) launched them into space, each to a different planet in the solar system; a passage by Harbinger knocked each rocket into a different timeline. This is apparently an expansion of an actual JSA story, the parallel timelines conceit being used to explain why the eight planets are nothing like they are in reality or even other DC stories. An okay idea, but Thomas is (as he often is) too faithful to the terrible stories, and they are deathly dull to read.
• #57-60: "Kaleidoscope" / "I Sing the Body Robotic!" / "Out of the Ashes… Mekanique!" / "The End of the Beginning!" (May-Aug. 1986) are technically post-Crisis, but the crimson skies remain as Roy Thomas ties up loose continuity ends before the series completes. He explains this as a the timeline changes being delayed by Mekanique, a robot villainess from the future. There's a neat bit where at the beginning of #60, a photo is taken of the All-Stars, then Mekanique lets history change, then the photo is developed, and you can compare the "original" to the photo and see which characters have been replaced (e.g., the Golden Age Superman no longer exists, but now Uncle Sam is there, as Earth-X's history has been folded in).

Issues #61-67 are an extended epilogue, no longer advancing the story of All-Star Squadron as The Young All-Stars was prepared. There are origin stories for Liberty Belle, the Shining Knight, Robotman, Johnny Quick, and Tarantula in #61-63, 65-66 (Sept. 1986–Feb. 1987), some of which are interesting, some not. Liberty Belle, the Shining Knight, and Johnny Quick didn't get very developed origins during All-Star Squadron's main run, so that was nice, but on the other hand, the stories of Robotman and Tarantula were hashed out in detail already. Plus we get a fun missing adventure in #64 (Dec. 1986), slotting in between issues #46 and 47 (June-July 1985). The last issue, #67 (Mar. 1987), rounds things out with a retelling of All Star Comics #4, the first real JSA adventure. As always, Roy Thomas is so faithful to the original as to make you wonder why he bothered! It's a fizzle of a last year for a comic that had been moving from success to success prior to Crisis.

On the whole, All-Star Squadron is the exact kind of superhero comic I enjoy. I like comics for the way they span large chunks of time, take in multiple issues and ideas, and build a tapestry. The joy of them for me is in the almost accidental way they do so: I love Green Arrow, for example, for his lack of constancy. If the character had been the same all along, I don't think I'd like him so much. All-Star Squadron is fun because it takes that accidental continuity and brings some coherence to it. But at the same time, it's just another installment in the accidental picture of Earth-Two, drawing on what Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz did in the 1970s, and providing a foundation for what other writers like James Robinson would do in the 1990s and beyond.

Oh, and having their base in the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair was super-cool. 

This post is the third in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
   

Review: All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever by Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, Joe Staton, et al.

Comic hardcover, 446 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 1976-79)
Acquired January 2020
Read February 2020

All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever

​

Writers: Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz

Pencillers: Ric Estrada, Keith Giffen, Joe Staton & Wally Wood
Inkers: Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Dave Hunt, Bob Layton, Joe Staton, Wally Wood
Colorists: Liz Berube, Carl Gafford, Adrienne Roy, Jerry Serpe, Anthony Tollin
Letterers: Todd Klein, Bill Morse, Ben Oda, Milt Snapinn

I've decided to read my way through most of DC's Earth-Two/Justice Society work. Specifically, I'm interested in what they did with the concept from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The Justice Society qua the Justice Society doesn't particularly interest me: I have no need to read a bunch of 1940s team-up comics. Rather, one of the thing I like most about DC is the sense of legacy and development, and I think you could argue that really starts with the Justice Society of America: because those characters didn't need need to stay eternally youthful like the Earth-One/Justice League ones, they could age, have children, change identities, and such, and when Earths-One and -Two were merged during the Crisis, this aspect of the premise got incorporate into the wider DC universe. So I'm not reading (much of) the old stuff, and I'm not going into the Geoff Johns era because, really, a little bit of Geoff Johns goes much too far in my experience. (And then in the "New 52" era, DC abandoned what made the concept work entirely.)

Helena, you're the best.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #465 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Dave Hunt)

Anyway, I think that whole approach to the JSA really begins here, with its first ongoing revival in the 1970s. At this point the JSA had guested in a number of Crisis on Multiple Earths stories, but this was the first time they appeared as the stars of their own series since they were shunted out of All Star Comics back in 1951.

Go Justice Society!
from All-Star Comics #74 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Joe Giella)

That said, this isn't that great. I mean, it's totally serviceable superhero action... but that's about it, with a couple exceptions. Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz have the sort of storytelling where the JSA is plunged from adventure into adventure: usually each storyline ends with a hook for the next already underway. But this actually makes the adventures seem small-- the pacing is never able to emphasize anything. It also makes it feel like these characters don't really have any lives outside of this title, since there's no gaps where they can live their own lives and have solo adventues. I mean, they literally don't, since none of them have ongoing series... but I would argue that they ought to feel like they do. Where do Sylvester Pemberton or Power Girl even live? What do they do when not superheroing? They feel more like, I dunno, the Teen Titans or the X-Men, than they do the multiversal equivalents of the Justice League.

Bruce Wayne: in any reality, still a jerk.
from All-Star Comics #69 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Bob Layton)

Most of the original threats here aren't very interesting, either. Vulcan, the astronaut who's always on fire? Some underground people? (Why is it always with the underground people in comics?) The writing is a little inconsistent, too. No one seems to know if Power Girl can fly or just jump really far. (In the earliest Golden Age comics, Superman could just jump really far, but by this point, he was long able to fly, and Power Girl ought to have the same power set.) Sometimes the book seems to be about a subset of the JSA called the "All Star Super Squad" but this is pretty inconsistently indicated, and eventually fades away.

And to think, Roy Thomas brought this guy back. Roy Thomas gonna Roy Thomas, I guess.
from All-Star Comics #60 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Keith Giffen & Wally Wood)

I did think it was interesting that the "parallel Earth" angle was occasionally pushed: this Earth has no apartheid in South Africa, for example. Not much was done with that, however.

If I was decades out of time, surely the thing I'd be reading about was earthquake science, too. (In later issues of All Star Comics, as well as Infinity, Inc., it becomes clear he didn't even look up his own family!)
from All Star Comics #59 (script by Gerry Conway with Paul Levitz, art by Ric Estrada & Wally Wood)

That said, this comic has some interesting seeds and nuggets. I liked the development of Dick Grayson, now American ambassador to South Africa. I liked the introduction of Power Girl, even if she was sometimes written too broadly. (I think you can write a confident feminist, and not have her come off like this.) I liked the secret origin of the Justice Society. I liked the Wildcat focus issue. I liked the idea of the Star-Spangled Kid being out of time. (In execution, I didn't always understand it. Why was he so lonely? Weren't all of the Seven Soldiers of Victory out of time? Go hang out with them!) I liked the introduction of the Huntress. I liked the death of the Earth-Two Batman. I liked the explanation for why the JSA was inactive from 1951 to the mid-1960s.

Oh, poor Helena.
from All-Star Comics #71 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Bob Layton)

You can see how later writers, especially Roy Thomas in the 1980s, would pick up and develop what was done here. There's the kernel of a good premise here, but (as it often is in mass-produced superhero comics) it will take a while for it to develop.

I haven't got to it yet, but I'm pretty sure Roy Thomas turned this one-issue story about the end of the original JSA into a whole epic.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #466 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton)

(A couple quibbles about this collected edition. It's clearly from the same "masters" as the Justice Society, Volume 1 and Volume 2 collections of 2006. Those collections replaced references to issue numbers from the original comics with ones to collections of that era. Now, those make no sense: they should have been updated again or (my preference) changed back to the originals. Also, it would have been nice if Justice League of America #171-72 had been included here, between Adventure Comics #465 and 466, since those issues of Adventure lead into the JSA's appearance in JLA and follow up on it. Also, I remember it as being rather good! Also also, I think choosing "All Star Comics" as the series imprint is weird; I feel like people are far more likely to find what they want and know what they're looking at with "Justice Society" branding. Collections of issues of Action Comics are never called "Action Comics" on the cover, and if they are, it's "Superman: Action Comics.")

This post is the first in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers The Huntress: Origins.

Archival Review: All-Star Superman, volume 2 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Comic trade paperback, 154 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 2007-08)
Acquired October 2010
Read March 2011

All-Star Superman, volume 2

Written by Grant Morrison

Pencilled by Frank Quitely
Inked & colored by Jamie Grant
Lettered by Phil Balsman

I didn't like the second volume of All-Star Superman as much as the first. It's got some great stuff, but unfortunately, it starts a bit slow, with a two-issue story about Superman venturing into the Underverse to meet Zibarro, who is the Bizarro version of Clark Kent. I've never found the Bizarro concept interesting, and this spin on it didn't do a lot for me either. The replacement Superman story is competent, but a little weak too-- Superman is conveniently saved from his dilemma. Which is par for the course for the crappy Silver Age stories this tale is emulating, but not necessarily something I want to see here.

"Neverending," though, is where things get great again, as Superman writes his last will a testament. This is just chock full of great moments, but my favorite is Superman flying a bus full of terminally ill kids to Egypt to see the Pyramids. I smiled so big at that one. That's why Superman's great. (Unlike Mark Waid in the introduction, though, the scene where Superman stops a girl from committing suicide did nothing for me, probably because she was goth. It was a little stereotypical.)

And as for the two-part finale, where Superman battle Lex Luthor under the red glow of the tyrant sun after Earth's own sun has been extinguished... well, of course it's good.

This volume isn't quite the near-perfect Superman story of the first volume, but overall, All-Star Superman is a twelve-part explanation of everything that makes Superman my favorite superhero.

(I'm sure Frank Quitely's excellent art has received lots of praise-- he does a great Clark, especially-- but I just want to mention that his Lois has amazing legs.)

Archival Review: All-Star Superman, volume 1 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

I read volume one of All-Star Superman back in September 2008. Coming to the second volume nearly three years later(!), I decided my best move was to reread the first, which I scarcely remembered at all:

Comic trade paperback, 154 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2006-07)
Acquired and previously read September 2008
Reread March 2011

All-Star Superman, volume 1

Written by Grant Morrison

Pencilled by Frank Quitely
Inked & colored by Jamie Grant
Lettered by Phil Balsman

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely get a lot of kudos for All-Star Superman. For telling a great, fantastic, groundbreaking, amazing story. But I don't think that's true.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely tell a perfect Superman story. They don't really do anything extraordinary here. They don't reboot Superman, or question his core morals, or kill him off, or show him in an alternate timeline. They just tell a Superman story. Oh sure, there's a plot about how Superman is dying from... the sun or something, and I guess he's got to perform Twelve Labors, though he seems to forget that. But the adventures he goes on here are all just run-of-the-mill Superman adventures. Nothing impressive.

Except that they're perfect.

Superman turns evil, and only Jimmy Olsen, Metropolis's best hipster, can save him. A perfectly done Jimmy Olsen weirdness story.

Clark Kent goes to interview Lex Luthor in prison, and there's a prison riot where Lex thinks he's orchestrating everything, but really Superman saves the day every time. A perfectly done Lex Luthor story.

Superman remembers the last day he saw his father. A perfectly done Pa Kent story.

Morrison and Quitely do the bumbling, they do the weirdness, they do the heroism. They do nearly everything right.

Nearly everything? The two issues about Lois learning who Superman really is are good... but they sidestep the most interesting parts of the story. But aside from that, they're perfect too.

All-Star Superman, volume 1 didn't blow my mind. But it did do exactly everything I wanted a Superman story to do.